Design Leadership at Scale: Career Strategy
Rachel Kobetz
Chief Design Officer, PayPal
Kristin Skinner
Chief Experience Officer, &GSD
Shape a design career that provides you growth, development, and success.
Design Leadership at Scale: Career Strategy is for senior design leaders seeking clarity, leverage, and momentum.
This immersive includes 6 hours of live instruction, combining lectures, facilitated breakouts, applied exercises, and two in-depth office hours with Rachel and Kristin focused on your specific career decisions and next moves.
Grounded in real executive hiring and leadership experience, the course draws on frameworks used to define senior roles, assess leadership readiness, and hire thousands of designers at global companies. This is not generic career advice—it’s executive-grade career strategy for design leaders operating at scale.
Whether you’re advancing within your organization or evaluating what’s next, you’ll leave with a clear, defensible career blueprint.
// Course Content
Architect Your Career
Define senior-level leadership paths
Clarify what differentiates you
Benchmark your strengths
Build a forward-looking career strategy
Advance Your Impact
Identify high-leverage growth areas
Define success on your terms
Create a long-range career roadmap
Make intentional career moves
Bonus
How senior leaders evaluate roles and companies
Two live office hours for tailored guidance and Q+A
What you’ll learn
Executive career frameworks and decision tools to define your path, increase leverage, and make intentional next moves as a design leader.
Clarify your long-term trajectory, role scope, and leadership direction beyond title or tenure.
Translate ambition into a concrete strategy you can pressure-test against real opportunities.
Evaluate your experience and signals against how senior design leaders are actually hired.
Identify gaps that matter (and which ones don’t) at Director+, VP, and CDO levels.
Articulate your edge beyond craft: scope, judgment, operating altitude, and influence.
Position yourself clearly in the market.
Learn how to evaluate roles, mandates, and companies with executive-level rigor.
Avoid mis-scoped roles that limit impact, growth, or long-term trajectory.
Identify where you’re over-investing effort without return, and where leverage actually sits.
Shift from reactive career decisions to deliberate, compounding moves.
Create a clear, actionable plan you can use immediately after the course.
Gain confidence in your direction, even amid org change or market uncertainty.
Who this course is for
Ambitious Senior Managers, Directors, and VP-level design leaders in both startups and large technology product companies.
It's ideal for those planning on staying and growing at your current company for the next 3+ years or are thinking of changing companies.
This course is not for aspiring design managers and early-career design managers. It does not focus on the detailed steps of skill-building.
What's included
Live sessions
Learn directly from Rachel Kobetz & Kristin Skinner in a real-time, interactive format.
Lifetime access
Go back to course content and recordings whenever you need to.
Community of peers
Stay accountable and share insights with like-minded professionals.
Certificate of completion
Share your new skills with your employer or on LinkedIn.
Maven Guarantee
This course is backed by the Maven Guarantee. Students are eligible for a full refund up until the halfway point of the course.
Course syllabus
2 lessons • 9 projects
Week 1
Session 1: Architect Your Career
Session 2: Advance Your Impact
Free resource
How Design Leaders Stand Out in a Competitive Market
How to become an industry standout
Learn the nuances of distinguishing yourself and making your mark in a competitive landscape.
How to build and leverage your network
Establish relationships with hiring managers, recruiters, and execs that keep you top of mind ahead of role openings.
How to make informed career moves
Learn how to select the right roles and opportunities that align with your long-term career vision.
Schedule
Live sessions
6 hrs / week
Projects
2-3 hrs / week
Async content
4 hrs / week